This is a random personal blog - covering everything from poetry to politics. Views presented are strictly my own.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Harappa Valley Civilisation and the Aryans: 4 new theories

These theories have been on my desktop for at least a year. The more I explore them, the more I believe in them.

For what they are worth, sharing them here.

Theory
1: The Vedic
people were not ruthless attackers. They were colonisers rather than sudden
attackers. They were nomads with a strong military knowhow, who came to the
largely mercantile Harappan society and , much like the European model in the
middle ages, explained the importance of security. They then took up the “job”
of security – more likely in some parts more than the others, and went on, just
like the British, to rule. The story of the frog king who hired a snake to
fight off rival frog princes, and was eventually eaten up by the snake. Probably,
the Harappans did gather some military resources and strategy lessons as time
passed, but in the end, they were not victorious.

Theory
2: The Harappan
script is not a literary script. The seals are again, mercantile rather than
literary. A mercantile script is a method of codification – communicating the
most information in the least possible symbols. So each line on the seal is
important, but just like the modern Mumbai dabbavalaas, it is a code, and not a
script by itself.

The seals
were used to denote trade transactions and not literary content. It was not a
method of writing stories. At the very least, this means that the script had:

Issued under the authority of

Nature of goods

Quality

Quantity/ weight/value/ other
measurement.

Trading / manufacturing unit who uses
that seal.

The fact
that the seals were designed for multiple times use indicates very strongly
that the Harappan people had, in fact, standardized SKUs( Stock Keeping Units)
– a very advanced feature of trade economies which we believe was brought to
India by the MNCs.

Theory
3: This builds
upon my earlier work that the structure of the Harappan script is more native
to India than any Western influence. But when we look at the structure of the
script, we realize that it is not for a written script, but for a society where
the accuracy of oral rendition is of utmost importance. Not only are the vowels and consonants separated,
but within that, the consonants are arranged by the parts of the mouth that are
used. If a child learns this structure, they are very likely to be able to make
no mistake in the language itself when they use it. Furthermore, to arrive at
this scientific gradation requires in depth study of sounds and their
physiological source, which is not possible without there being a formal
program for research and a significant sponsorship for the adoption of this
method. The hypothesis is that the Harappans used this structure to teach
“language” to their children, and the Aryans, having found that this is a much
better way to understand sounds than their own structure, adopted it gradually
and then claimed it as their own. They probably gave written symbols to the
structure already being used, but they did not create that phonetics based
structure.

Theory
4: Were the Harappans
the modern Tamilsor Dravidians?

I base my
hypothesis on 2 things:

First,
the geographical location of the Sindhu valley – as early as 4500 BC, the
Sindhu valley did not have a known presence of the Negroid people. That region
is more suited to the presence of a race more capable of withstanding the cold
temperatures of the region. As part of the evolutionary process, any people
living there, would have had to have light skin, to absorb more sunlight. The
high melanin content, a trait of the Negroid race, would have been a
significant evolutionary hurdle in that geographical location. Just as the
Aryans and the Caucasians share the same ancestry, yet the Caucasian race calls
the Aryans “brown”, the Aryans probably found the native people darker than
their own skin, but that alone should not lead us to believe that these people
had the pigmentation of the Negroid race.

Two,
Assuming that there was a mass attack or a colonization. Now, if you were a
mercantile civilization, with already established links, you were more likely
to travel in a direction that you know, than in a direction that you do not
know. Which means that the Harappan people, assuming that they had to move,
would have been more likely to approach their mercantile contacts in the West,
rather than move to the jungles on the East and travel through them all the way
to the South. The chance of survival was greater where there is a trade and you
know how to make money. The jungles, on the other hand, need survival skills
that were not the strong area of the Harappans, though the Aryans would have
been completely at ease with the idea of exploring virgin terrains.

So, I
believe that the Harappans were connected, to a limited extent, with the other
cultures of Hindoostan only to the extent that their river systems interacted
and depended on each other. But they did not move through India to eventually
settle at the edge of the peninsula.